Cats are legal to own. They get shelter, clean food and water including medical care. In fact people release cats into wild when they don't want to care for them leading to a lot of wildcats. While some places forbid cats going outside and encourage desexing, all this doesn't help the disadvantaged wildlife. Cats should be banned.
Why not legalize ownership of domesticated native animals such as koalas for example? Boom to tourism, culture and wildlife. Lots of funds can go to welfare of wildlife instead of foreign animals. What happens to domesticated koalas being released by people who dont want to care for them? A lot of wild koalas.
Taking a native animal and locking them in a back yard doesn't make them domesticated. Dogs and cats (to a lesser extent) co-evolved with humans over thousands of years and can even be seen as a partnership.
Koalas in particular would make terrible pets, they need a lot of space for multiple Eucalyptus trees to keep them fed because they're stupid to recognize fresh leaves pulled off a tree from leaves still attached to a tree, they can be very aggressive, they piss everywhere and thanks to their diet it's got an extremely strong smell. And to top it all off this smelly piss can transmit the chlamydia that they are widely suffering from to humans.
Outdoor cats should be banned but they aren't going to be replaced by Koalas any time soon.
Wild animal babies are rescued all the time. Fed and returned to wild. That's a potential source. But it will still take time but possible, an example I've followed are siberian foxes. Who expects an adult koala born in a backyard to suddenly be domesticated? I expect domestication of a wild adult koala to be the same as domesticating an adult wildcat. Very difficult despite "thousands of years of existing with humans"
I don't think koalas need the space. We're certainly not giving cats and dogs lots of room with chickens for them to feed on. We've been giving them dry and canned food. Another example are horses who eat hay are often in the barn.
There's not much funding for Chlamydia or similar health issues they have because the funding relies on government and people goodwill. If over a million koalas are owned by people, a lot of people would pay for medical solutions for their ill family members. Average population just doesnt have the same goodwill towards wild animals.
> I don't think koalas need the space. We're certainly not giving cats and dogs lots of room with chickens for them to feed on. We've been giving them dry and canned food. Another example are horses who eat hay are often in the barn.
The need the space for the trees, they need the trees because they simply won't eat from non-fresh sources. Buying food from the shop like we do for cats and dogs is simply not an option.
> I expect domestication of a wild adult koala to be the same as domesticating an adult wildcat
Why would you expect that given the wildly different starting points? Wildcats are somewhat generalist carnivorous pack animals, quite similar to our selves and species that have been (debatably) domesticated before. Koalas are hyper specialized and very stupid herbivores with no domesticated relatives. There are many species on earth but very few of them are suitable for domestication, especially domestication in modern urban environments.
It's so sad you're being downvoted because you're right. Cats are destroying many of the world's ecosystems and cats owners and stray feeders are to blame.
Why not legalize ownership of domesticated native animals such as koalas for example? Boom to tourism, culture and wildlife. Lots of funds can go to welfare of wildlife instead of foreign animals. What happens to domesticated koalas being released by people who dont want to care for them? A lot of wild koalas.